Traveling Thoughts

We got our first snow of the season yesterday, it was barely a dusting, but, when I woke up this morning there was more, maybe an inch or a little less, it’s so exciting.  It screams wet winter, which is great because last year there was only one day of a light dusting, it was pathetic.  I went to durango in May and found snow.  What a sight that was, me sledding in my shorts.

But it snowed yesterday and it snowed today and I’m completely prepared for winter because on Saturday I went and bought a new burton jacket and matching snow pants to go with it.

Yesterday, since the snow on the streets was next to none, I stopped to take some pictures of the mountains.  I put them all together into one big panoramic like picture.  It was cloudy over the mountains and kindof cool.  I’ve not quite figured out how to fully work my digital camera yet, so the different images are darker/lighter than the previous.  Regardless, it’s still a cool picture of my sandia mountains.

My sister calls me from Vegas yesterday morning and tells me about this shirt that her husband got from this conference thing he’s at and that there’s a code on the back of it and how if he can decrypt it he’ll be entered for a chance to win a laptop.  She then proceeds to ask me if I’ll decrypt it and starts reading it off to me. *I rolled my eyes*  It was a bunch of numbers raised to some power.

I typed it all into word and made it all look pretty:

2¹8²8¹6³3¹3²7⁴5²

7⁴8²2²7⁴2³7³4³7¹8¹4³6³6²

2³8²7⁴8¹6³6¹3²7³7⁴ [space] 2¹7³3²

2¹4¹3²6²8¹7⁴ [space] 6³3³ [space] 2³4²2¹6²4¹3²

I hung up with her and took a look at the code, I had no primer or anything and so when I started to try to apply mathematical equations to it to get a letter I couldn’t.  I really had no clues other than the front of the shirt saying Autodesk Subscriber, and the back of the shirt saying “Get A Clue”…yes, I needed a clue alright.

After an hour or so of my mathematical equations, I decided to look at the encryption like a cryptogram but with numbers instead of the letters.  I looked at my two and three letter words to see what they could possibly be.  My first thoughts for the three letter word were “the” and  “and” it was neither of them, but I did get going in the right direction with both of them.  E is the most commonly used letter in the alphabet but I couldn’t think of a three letter word that started with E so I decided that my most common letter was A and my second most common was E and that made my three letter word start with an A and end with an E so it became ARE.  My first word began with an A and had an E in it and my second word had an R in it so I decided to do some counting of the letters, the first word had the same number of letters as AUTODESK and had the A and the E in the proper place so I decided that word 1 was AUTODESK, in the same fashion I compared the number of letters in word two to SUBSCRIPTION, and low and behold, the R was in the proper place.  It was fairly easy to figure things out from there and what I came up with was:

Autodesk Subscription Customers Are Agents of Change.

By the time I called my sister tonight, they had already figured it out, but at least we came up with the same thing :)

In my english class this week, we’re having a discussion about ads on blogs and the sort and there was a comment made:

“I guess it would be nice if the bloggers being paid were upfront about the fact that they’re mentioning corporations for profit….”

There is now an easy way for bloggers to make their readers aware of the content that’s on their blogs and if it’s being paid for or not. DisclosurePolicy.Org makes it easy by asking bloggers a series of six questions and then taking their answers and creating a policy for them to display on their website.

I’ve went ahead and created a policy since, as of this entry, some of my entries will be for profit. What’s cool about the policy is that there’s several options for each question and I was able to make it clear that while some of the posts on my site are for profit, they don’t influence what I write (I get to choose what I write for and I get to choose the opinion I write), and I will make it known that they are for profit entries (as this one is).

My policy is posted on it’s very own page entitled ‘Disclosure Policy‘ that is clearly seen on the front page of my site in the righthand navigation bar, but for giggles and grins, I’m going to post it here as well:

This policy is valid from 29 November 2006

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. For questions about this blog, please contact Court (court At travelingthoughts Dot com).

This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

The compensation received will never influence the content, topics or posts made in this blog. All advertising is in the form of advertisements generated by a third party ad network. Those advertisements will be identified as paid advertisements.

The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers’ own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.
To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org/

There was a time in my life where I thought “The Bachelor”/”The Bachelorette” was a cool show to watch.  Last night I walked out an hour before Lorenzo Borghese chose the woman he was going to marry because I was bored.  Of course, I haven’t watched much of this season because I got irritated one night when Lorenzo went to meet on girls parents and they asked him something on the order of ‘why do you think she can be the one you choose’ and he said ‘well, she’s beautiful’.

Note to any man that think he may ever want to marry me, if my parents ask you why you want me as your wife the first thing had better not be ‘because she’s beautiful’…in fact, that had better come last in your long list of reasons you want to marry me…if you do mention first off that i’m beautiful my dad had better send you packing…there’s so much more to people than just beauty.  And if you see me for just beauty then our relationship must be superficial and I woudln’t want to marry you…of course, our relationship probably wouldn’t get that far if I thought that you thought that I was just a piece of ass.

I think that right there sums up why I left an hour early last night and didn’t ever come back to see who he picked.  It was the same situation but this time it was his parents asking the chick why she thought he was the one and she said ‘well, i can write my list and he’s got a check next to each item’ ok…good, he matches what you want in a man, what are those qualifications, what is it that he’s got checks next to, the fact that he’s a prince, he’s probably got money…seriously people…

it just irritates me to no end…I hope for the man who wants to marry me sake that he’s got the brains enough to tell my parents what it is about ‘ME’ that makes him want to marry me…

I usually hate black friday for two reasons:

First, I can’t go out anywhere because every store is croweded because people think that it’s the best (or one of the best) shopping days of the year.  Of course, if Christmas wasn’t so commercialized, we wouldn’t need that best shopping day of the year.

Second, I hate decorating the house.  It’s a lot of work to get a tree up and get lights on it and decorated.  Usually, I’ll find whatever reason I can to not be home to help mom put up all the Christmas stuff.  When I was younger and couldn’t escape the house I still managed to find excuses not to help.  In fact, one year, I was supposed to be helping and I laid down on the couch and fell asleep instead (I’m really shocked that she let me stay sleeping.)

This year however was different.  I willingly helped my mom decorate the house, I didn’t have to as I already had an escape because I was housesitting another house, but I came home and helped decorate.  It took close to 9 hours.

The most memorable event though was when mom took out the star before I was done decorating the tree and I said “Mom!  You can’t put the star up until the tree’s fully decorated.”  She responded, “Fine, but I can’t pick you up anymore.”  It was cute.

And so, here’s a picture of me putting up the star when the tree was fully decorated.

Usually, I hate the holidays, they just, annoy me…really at this time, there’s no other reason for me to hate them…but I do.  Except not this particular holiday.  It was strange…I usually can find any reason to fight with my younger sister and there was no such fighting today.  My older sister usually finds a way to irritate me, but not today.  It was way strange.  As for the strangness being caused by a change in my attitude, I highly doubt it.  At least not my attitude towards my younger sister, my older sister perhaps because this is the first holiday since her 52 day stint in the hospital on life support for 42 of those days…maybe my attitude changed, but perhaps only slightly.

In other great news, I got to be the center of attention for a while why the family watched me on TV.  My skydiving video’s provided a somewhat more than usual amount of conversation.  That was cool.

The food was great.  Mom made cream corn for me because I requested it, which I really appreciated.  Thank You Mom!  I also had, of course, turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and stuffing.  Oh yeah, and pumpkin pie (which I was supposed to help make but mom had made it before I got home to make it)

It was a good turkey day.

Well, after an immensely long time I have finally changed the colors of the deep dark October design to the November design and November is almost over so in a week or so I’ll have to change to December’s design.  It’s rough changing the colors each month to match the masthead, but you know what, it’s fun.  And I’ve simplified it so it shouldn’t be too bad in the future.

I’ve also made the contact page available to the public with the meebo me widget on it. 

I had to strip some of the features that the October design had due to not being able to style them as I wanted, but with time, they will return.

I’m not sure why parents ask this question.  I’ve had my mom (who starts her Christmas shopping in August) come to me several times and say ‘Court, I’ve not received a list from you.’

Me: ‘Mom, I don’t want anything.’

A week later, Mom: ‘Court, I’ve not received a list from you.’

Me: ‘Mom, money is fine.’

A few days later, Me, calls from REI ‘Mom, I know what I want for Christmas, there’s a Burton Jacket…’
Mom: ‘How much does it cost?’
Me: ‘$150…’
Mom: ‘You know we can’t afford that’

Ok, so I just don’t get it, but mom does, she thinks the same thing I think and am about to write.  Well, most of it anyways.

Why do parents ask us for a christmas list if they’re not going to be able to afford anything that’s on the list?  It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Here’s what makes sense to both me and mom, anything that I could possibly put on the list that they could afford I’ve already bought for myself because I could afford it.  Thus leaving me with nothing to put on my list, because I just buy the crap I want. 

Freakin’ commercialized holiday just really pisses me off…it would be a whole lot cheaper for everyone if no one bought gifts…as it is, I usually break even.  I give as much as I get.  It would be far better if people didn’t buy me crap I didn’t need, if I didn’t buy them crap they didn’t need, and we all spent our own money on ourselves buying the crap we think we need (which we probably don’t but that’s besides the point)

It certainly doesn’t take much to throw me into a fit of anger.  Today is Verterans Day and at church tonight they had to do a thing for the past and present service(wo)men.  They played the song by Toby Keith, American Soldier.  During which my neighbor in the seat next to me turns to me and says ‘I was a soldier, I was in the Air Force’.  She could’ve named any other of the armed forces and it probably wouldn’t have made me as angry as it did or bring tears to my eyes.  If I haven’t previously mentioned it, I’ll mention it now about how bitter I am to have had my opportunity to be in the Air Force stripped from me.  And even still, I’m amazed by the number of calls I’ll get from the Army and Air Force (never from the Navy, Coast Guard or Marines) about joining.  I would’ve never joined the Army but I did want to be in the Air Force.  I really wanted to be a fighter pilot but I would’ve settled for paratrooper.  But no, it’s amazing to see all the dreams diabetes can strip from you.  I think most my bitterness now is about the fact that they won’t let me in and I have other skills that could be valuable outside of being on the frontlines.  I was ok, dealing with it this evening until my neighbor made her comment.  And it’s not her fault and I probably shouldn’t have expressed my anger to her (I didn’t even tell her what it was about).  But I’m angry anyways and yes, I’m complaining about how I cna’t serve my country in the manner that I think I should be able to.

WWAN’s are becoming more and more popular because of the amount of travel that is done by business people and their general reliance on technology.  When we think of WWANs and the amount of wireless coverage they give us, it helps to think of it as a pond.  We’ll use a frog pond with lilly pads and lone reeds.  At anytime, our frog (the laptop) can jump around the pond with us from one location to another and may find a WLAN, wireless local area network to use, these will be our lillypads.  As the frog jumps from lillypad to lillypad, their connection signal is lost as soon as they’re outside the perimeter of the lillypad.  WWAN however is the entire pond, no matter where our frog goes in the pond, we have access.  We don’t loose our connection as we hop from lillypad to lillypad.  The pond of WWAN can be the size of an entire nation.  The pond may contain several networks that accumlated together create the total area of the WWAN.  Think about the lone reeds sticking out from the pond as being the towers that send and receive the signals.  There is one more important detail regarding our pond.  It’s a Country Club Pond.  You can only access it if you pay for it.  We have to pay for access to it because WWANs do not operate over unlicensed frequencies.  Carriers have to get a license for the spectrum being used and thus, we get to pay for our usage of the WWAN.

[this is for a paper that I’m writing about WWAN, we were told to write about the nature of our technology in laymans terms. this is what i’ve come up with, I’m thinking that any non-technical person should be able to understand it.  In case you’re wondering what WWAN is, it was defined early in the paper as Wireless Wide Area Network]